daily 11/27/2016

To see whether the same is true in the Olympics,1In our recent article in the International Journal of the History of Sport. we analyzed medal counts since World War II2We excluded 1948 from the analysis because it had been 12 years since the previous Olympics. by comparing a country’s results in the year it hosted the games to its results in the games four years earlier.

Excluding the years affected by these boycotts brings the average increase in overall medal count to 12.2 and in gold medal count to 6.8.

The table above shows that the number of athletes that a country sends to the games jumps tremendously when it is the host.

To assess the impact that participation levels have on the medal count, we compared the ratio of medals to participants for host nations.